The bottom of the world income distribution paints as sharp and as distinctive a picture as the top. If you instead make a list of the poorest thirty countries in the world today, you will find almost all of them in sub-Saharan Africa. They are joined by countries such as Afghanistan, Haiti, and Nepal, which, though not in Africa, all share something critical with African nations, as we’ll explain. If you went back fifty years, the countries in the top and bottom thirty wouldn’t be greatly different. Singapore and South Korea would not be among the richest countries, and there would be several
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